Any Room For Aesthetics?

Abstract

This article describes the everyday practices of consumption of heavily indebted people and discusses the links between economic resources and everyday aesthetics. It is based on interviews with people in a Finnish debt adjustment programme. Becoming overindebted has markedly changed the interviewees’ habits of consumption that are now characterized by constant and careful control of the resources and a self-understanding of never buying anything unnecessary. Becoming indebted has also affected the interviewees’ relations to the social world: on the one hand they now feel themselves inferior compared to other consumers with more resources; but on the other, some of them feel critical and superior in relation to the whole consumer culture; indebtedness has given them ‘new values’. Despite this critical stance, small pleasures and aesthetic judgements intermingle in the interviewees’ practices of shopping. Thus it becomes evident that degrees of freedom or aestheticism in consumption are not completely reducible to resources.